Video captures hours following Canadian soldier's suicide

Video captures hours following soldier's suicide
by Leslie MacKinnon
Posted: April 20, 2012

In the Military Police Complaints Commission's cramped hearing room Thursday morning a hushed audience of lawyers and reporters watched a half hour video.

The video is part of a military investigation into the suicide by hanging of Cpl. Stuart Langridge who killed himself on March 15th, 2008.

The images show Cpl. Langridge's body suspended from a bar in his room at Edmonton Garrison barracks. The camera zooms in on his face and neck, and then circles around the room cataloguing Langridge's possessions, down to the T-shirts in his drawer.

Cpl. Langridge's parents - his mother Sheila and stepfather Shaun Fynes - were not in the room. They've been present most days as the Military Police Complaints Commission hears complaint into how the military handled the investigation into their son's death.

The Fynes pushed to have the video played at the hearing.

The military says Langridge committed suicide because he suffered from depression caused by a drug and alcohol addiction.

Langridge's parents say he had post-traumatic stress syndrome, which the military would not acknowledge, triggered by his tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

One of the Fynes' grievances is that their son's body was left hanging for four hours after it was discovered, to the point, they say, where people had to knock him out of the way to get in and out of the room. Shaun Fynes, a former police officer, told the military that as a policeman he was taught to cut a body down immediately as long as the knot is preserved.
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